I plan to upgrade my hard drive from 320 gb to 750 gb. I have a macbook pro 13 inch laptop which I purchased last October. Can I just do a fresh install of osx lion on the new hard drive? Do you guys recommend hard drives from Western Digital or Samsung?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
See what is available from the Mac specialists at places like OWC, http://www.macsales.com as they will be guaranteed to fit and work with your MBP.
A clean install of the operating system would be a good approach...you could make a copy of the installer on a flash drive, or an external drive and then install on the new drive. An external drive would be a good idea to get, clone the internal you now have so the external is bootable, install the new internal, boot from the external and clone back. That way you would retain all content you now have.
I recommend that a 750 Gb 7200 rpm HDD would be an excellent choice. As far as brands go, my rule of thumb is if it works, its good.
One factor to consider when you install a larger HDD is how it will affect your backup situation. My rule of thumb there is to have a backup disk at least as large as the internal drive in your MBP. You might consider getting two HDDs. In any event you will need to consider getting an enclosure for the swap and a place for your current 320 Gb HDD.
I concur with Ralph Landry's thought on a clean install. I did that a few days ago and the response that I am now experiencing is a dramatic improvement to what I had before. Boot time has been cut in half and shut down is less than 10 seconds as opposed to a minute plus. Just indicative of all the unnecessary garbage I collected along the way for the past 18 months. Since you have a newer MBP, such differences may not occur with yours.
Ciao.
Thanks for the info. I might have to boot up with my old hard drive once I purchase and enclosure for this one. From there would it be possible for me to reinstall osx lion on the new hard drive? Do I just need to clone my hard drive?
The easiest way is to clone the HDD. I personally always use Disk Utility>Restore to do this but since you have Lion installed, I'm not sure how it will deal with the Lion OS partition (I'm still on Snow Leopard). Therefore I suggest you use Carbon Copy Cloner. They have instructions on dealing with that potential problem. Attached are the instructions:
http://help.bombich.com/kb/advanced-strategies/the-disk-center#recovery_hd
Ciao.
Has anybody tried putting the default hard drive on an enclosure booting from there. While booting you are pressing command + r to bring up the Lion recovery screen. Are you able to reinstall lion to the new hard drive by selecting reinstall lion? Is this possible?
Provided you have a working Recovery HD available, you can copy over the Recovery HD from your old drive to your new drive using this little utility:
OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
Then you can use the Recovery HD on the new drive to download and install a pristine copy of Lion, or clone to it or use Disk Utility recover, or whatever suits your fancy.
Thanks. As much as possible I don't want to clone it anymore. I might have to buy an enclosure so I could put my old hard drive on that enclosure.
Buying a new Drive and an external enclosure is what I have done in the past, but admittedly that was pre-Lion. When the external is working to your liking, just swap them.
This has a distinct advantage over installing a completely blank drive inside your Mac, and trying to boot it up and get it working with no software readily available.
The technique works pretty well, as the Mac boot just as readily to an external as an internal. An enclosure with only USB will be s-l-o-w. This is acceptable for backup, but makes the other work a pain. FireWire is fast enough not to be a burden.
Well actually just plan to use the old drive to boot up my laptop while I'm installing lion on the new hard drive. I plan to erase the old hard drive and use this to back up my files.
That sounds like a matter of personal preference. I like to set up the new drive as an external first, because then I have not changed anything on the old one and I (should) get no surprises.
If I swap the new one into the Internal bay first, and I cannot get the old one working as an external for some reason, it could get dicey.
Ok. I was just wondering when you replace the old hard drive with a new one. You don't have to disconnect the battery anymore?
On most of them, you simply can't disconnect the battery. But for the Hard drive, off is off -- there is nothing being trickle-powered.
I thought I damaged my macbook pro. I tried replacing the hard drive with a much newer one. For some reason my mbp wont start loading. I forgot to plug in the power cable. Could this be the reason why it wouldn't start. Anyway, the enclosure that I bought from ebay for $6 broke down. So basically I had to order a new one from newegg. I'll try again next week.
Upgrading to a much larger hard drive
